‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight

Researchers led by MIT professor Daniel Nocera have produced something they’re calling an “artificial leaf”: Like living leaves, the device can turn the energy of sunlight directly into a chemical fuel that can be stored and used later as an energy source.

The artificial leaf — a silicon solar cell with different catalytic materials bonded onto its two sides — needs no external wires or control circuits to operate. Simply placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, it quickly begins to generate streams of bubbles: oxygen bubbles from one side and hydrogen bubbles from the other. If placed in a container that has a barrier to separate the two sides, the two streams of bubbles can be collected and stored, and used later to deliver power: for example, by feeding them into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current.

The device, Nocera explains, is made entirely of earth-abundant, inexpensive materials — mostly silicon, cobalt and nickel — and works in ordinary water. Other attempts to produce devices that could use sunlight to split water have relied on corrosive solutions or on relatively rare and expensive materials such as platinum.
Ultimately, he sees a future in which individual homes could be equipped with solar-collection systems based on this principle: Panels on the roof could use sunlight to produce hydrogen and oxygen that would be stored in tanks, and then fed to a fuel cell whenever electricity is needed. Such systems, Nocera hopes, could be made simple and inexpensive enough so that they could be widely adopted throughout the world, including many areas that do not presently have access to reliable sources of electricity.

Professor James Barber, a biochemist from Imperial College London who was not involved in this research, says Nocera’s 2008 finding of the cobalt-based catalyst was a “major discovery,” and these latest findings “are equally as important, since now the water-splitting reaction is powered entirely by visible light using tightly coupled systems comparable with that used in natural photosynthesis. This is a major achievement, which is one more step toward developing cheap and robust technology to harvest solar energy as chemical fuel.”

2 thoughts on “‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight

  1. I feel that this product could have a huge impact on making solar power more abundantly used around the world. I think that one of the biggest impacts could be felt in developing countries who might not have a well developed infrastructure. This technology would allow people in those countries to get electricity cheaper than from solar panels. However, a problem might arise especially in parts of Africa where water might not be that abundant, so getting enough water for the fuel cells might be difficult because they need the little water that they do have for more important things like drinking or cooking.

  2. This is a great idea. MIT always have some amazing products. What’s great about it is it doesn’t need energy to maintain the artificial leaf and it doesn’t need human operation to make it work. You don’t need a person to take care of it or open the switch to make it work. Plus the price of the artificial leaf is pretty low which means that this atuo-energy-transforming technology can be wildly used in the future. Because the only input energy is water and sunlight and the output is hydrogen and oxygen, it’s a eco-friendly technology.
    Many other institutions are working on the same thing. Check out Caltech’s Solar Fuels design:
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/artificial-leaf-is-ten-times-better-at-generating-hydrogen-from-sunlight

    Read More about MIT Artificial Leaf: http://news.mit.edu/2011/artificial-leaf-0930

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